Long description:

Imagining equitable streets for all

For the past century, our roadways have been engineered as pipes for cars, but they offer vast potential as public spaces. From New York and Boston to Portland and Los Angeles, cities are rethinking their streets, going beyond sidewalks and bike lanes to welcome nonmotorists to share the asphalt roadway. Reclaiming the Road traces the historical evolution of America’s streets and explores contemporary movements to retake them from cars—temporarily and permanently—for diverse forms of mobility and community life. To share the street raises important questions of equity, in transportation and beyond. David L. Prytherch proposes a bold, intersectional vision of a more just street.

Reclaiming the Road connects cutting-edge theory, policy analysis, and firsthand accounts from those leading the charge in transforming our streets to advocate for changing how we think about and design roads. Prytherch features case studies of nine major cities in the United States to show how experiments in reclaiming streets accelerated during the Covid-19 pandemic to become lasting changes. Through in-depth interviews, he shares stories of how planners, transportation advocates, and community leaders have implemented innovative programs for slowing neighborhood streets, opening roads for walking and biking, and reconstructing roadways with public parklets and street plazas as social spaces for curbside conversation.

Examining movements to transform streets through the lenses of equity and justice, Reclaiming the Road tackles the conceptual challenge of defining mobility justice and the practicalities of planning a more just public street, offering a compelling vision for the future of America’s public spaces.

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"How are cities across the United States reclaiming their streets as more equitable and diverse public spaces for everyone? Reclaiming the Road combines the history of urban planning and street design standards with theoretical insights about mobility politics and struggles for access and equity. Reporting from the front lines of recent post-pandemic physical and cultural transformations of public space in nine major American cities, David L. Prytherch raises profound questions about what streets are for and how they might be equitably shared. The result is a fresh, hopeful vision for intersectional mobility justice and public placemaking."—Mimi Sheller, author of Mobility Justice: The Politics of Movement in an Age of Extremes

"David L. Prytherch gives a crisp, clear, and accessible narrative of the movement to reclaim public streets after one hundred years of domination by private automobile interests. He touches on many of the key players in this epic struggle, from traffic engineers to complete streets and mobility justice advocacy. Steering us through the politics of streets during the Covid-19 pandemic and recovery, this is a refreshingly innovative and optimistic book for anyone concerned about our urban mobility future."—Jason Henderson, coauthor of Street Fights in Copenhagen: Bicycle and Car Politics in a Green Mobility City

Table of Contents:

Contents

Preface

Introduction

1. A Short History of the American Street: From Public Place to Pipe for Cars (and Back Again?)

2. On the Road to Mobility Justice: Intersecting Approaches to a Just Street

3. Multimodalism by Policy and Design

4. Slowing the Street

5. Opening the Street by Closing It

6. Reconstructing the Street as Public Place

Conclusion: The Promise and Challenge of Reclaiming Streets Equitably

Notes

Index